On the Horizon
No Longer Available
Completed
2022
Medium
Acrylic on canvas
Dimensions
8" x 8"
Description
NIGHT COMES EARLY Before everything was canceled, I took one last trip to Texas. It was October 2019, and unseasonable storms rolled through, dropping tornadoes and lightning on a swath that swept from my in-laws house to my husband's hometown of Garland. This was a precursor, I thought, to the storm chasing trip I was planning to make that summer. By Christmas, there were already media stirrings of a virus that was ravaging Wuhan, China. Soon, that virus had a name, and it was here, and I wasn’t going storm chasing. Fast forward to the post-vax world and I was in a car with my husband Andre, driving once again to Texas. This time it was tornado season, with one supercell after another marching across the flat and otherwise empty landscape. Andre drove the car and I shot out the window and I thought over and over again that I would love to drive forever, we could just keep going and going, the landscape unfurling ahead of us, a new vista every second….a visual feast after a year of seeing nothing but our own backyard. My last trip pre-covid, and my first trip post-vax were to Texas, both serving up storm after storm, as if this broken world was giving me the trip I’d canceled. Maybe you don’t need to chase something that’s placed in your path. We are bombarded with catastrophic images of severe weather in the media. My work deals with the same content, but these paintings are made from my own experiences, culled from wherever I happen to be. The slow apocalypse of climate change is with us every day; from heat waves, wildfires, grid failures, and floods, to storms rolling across the roads we travel with our beloveds. I’m interested in the daily, ongoing signs that are screaming at us, like the cursed Cassandra, that the end is surely near. But this world has a skin that looks the same as it ever was, and even shared moments of alarm recede into the bread and circuses that fill our days and our feeds and we march one step closer to our assured end.
About this Artist
Samantha Fields
Samantha Fields was born in Cleveland Ohio in 1972. After receiving her BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art, and her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, she moved to Los Angeles, where she is currently a Professor and Chair of the Art Department at California State University, Northridge. She has received numerous awards and recognition, including a prestigious City of Los Angeles (COLA) Individual Artist Grant. She has an extensive exhibition history, including shows at The California Museum of Photography at UCRartsblock, The University Art Museum in Long Beach, The Museum of Art & History, Lancaster, Western Project, & Kim Light/LIGHTBOX Gallery in Los Angeles, Traywick Contemporary in Berkeley, Melanee Cooper Gallery in Chicago, Solway Jones Gallery in Los Angeles, Dirt Gallery in Los Angeles, POST Gallery in Los Angeles, Domestic Setting Gallery in Mar Vista, California, Suzanne Hilberry Gallery in Detroit, Lemberg Gallery in Birmingham, Michigan, and Galerie Enholm Englehorn…
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